Infectious Bodies, Peculiar Territories: Visions of Invasion in 19th-Century Literature and Science

The aim of this article is to show how the military rhetoric related to infection manifested itself in works of science and popular fiction of the late 18th century and early 19th century; how human bodies were perceived as battlefields on which the forces of infection and resistance fought; and finally, how similes taken from literary texts were used to show and explain the strategies infective agents employed to infiltrate and terrorise their unsuspecting victims. This paper focuses on scientific and literary texts which contain two examples of uses of bodies in this ideological war: similes of bodies as peculiar territories under external threat, and bodies as sources of contagion, smuggled across the borders of actual territories.